Lights Out for Peace Now?

P. David Hornik
FrontPageMagazine.com | 4/18/2008

What if they gave a Peace Now ceremony and no one came? According to Ari Shavit, a journalist for Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretz, that almost happened one evening last week when a white tent went up in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square for an event marking Peace Now’s 30th anniversary.

“This time,” Shavit writes,

hundreds of thousands did not throng to the square, not even tens of thousands or even one thousand. But a handful of decent, devoted Israelis did come…anonymous patriots whose faces furrowed with wrinkles and their hair became white in the years they ran on the hills, stood holding up placards and carrying torches, trying to lessen the killing and injustice, to bring peace closer and keep war away.. In other words, the very small contingent that showed up were mostly people who had gotten on in years. Peace Now’s membership has indeed declined drastically since the Second Intifada broke out in 2000, with very little younger cadre arising to replace the movement’s aging veterans.

Shavit, once staunchly on the Left but now with some elements of a centrist outlook, says that Peace Now

bound together (justified) resistance to the occupation of the Palestinians and (invalid) faith that the Palestinians are the allies…. It was captivated by the PLO’s charms, and Oslo’s delusions, and finally became Yasser Arafat’s hostage.

Apart from that little error of being captivated by the charms of terrorists, Peace Now, in Shavit’s telling, got everything else right:

It understood that occupation corrupts, that the settlements were a disaster, that every effort must be made to divide the land between two nation-states…. that in the face of the right wing and settlers, a different Zionism was called for. An educated, rational, enlightened, moral Zionism…. [Peace Now] brought the Israeli center to adopt unmistakably left-wing positions, but could not stop the settlements in time.

If it sounds like “the settlements” are Shavit’s bête noire, indicating how entrenched he still is in the Peace Now outlook—that is indeed the case.

Nowhere in the article does Shavit even suggest which settlements he means—sizable towns like Betar Illit (pop. 35,000) or Maale Adumim (pop. 32,000), both located a few miles from Jerusalem, or Ariel (pop. 18,000), located in West Bank hill country on an invasion route to Israel’s coastal plain? Or does he mean the smaller, sprinkled, often more ideological West Bank settlements? He doesn’t say, and it doesn’t seem to matter to him when “settlements” remains something close to a curse word in his lexicon.

Israelis like Shavit took a position on the settlements—particularly the smaller, more isolated ones—that, without agreeing with it, one can understand: they thought these communities needlessly extended Israeli population into Palestinian-populated areas and threatened to perpetuate the need for Israel to rule these areas.

Apart, though, from the fact that all the territories in question are of security importance to Israel—as has been bitterly evident since the Gaza evacuation—seemingly it would have been possible for liberals like Shavit to take a different view that was both decidedly consonant with their principles and less divisive: that if peace was the ultimate goal, the Palestinian Arabs of the territories should not have found it so objectionable to have Israelis living among them just as Palestinian Arabs live among Israelis in pre-1967 Israel.

Indeed, seemingly from a liberal, tolerant outlook the more ideological settlers’ intense love of the biblical Land of Israel, and desire to live in it, could have been accepted as legitimate values and sentiments.

That, however, is the other pathological aspect of Peace Now that Shavit still does not “get”—and his failure to get it is the other side of the coin of his still overly mild criticism of Peace Now’s proterrorist sympathies.

Shavit knows, of course, about Peace Now’s fierce enmity toward what it thinks of as “the other” camp in Israeli society; it’s just that Shavit goes along with it, as when he writes:

From its outset the Israeli peace movement had not only a political platform but also a genetic code. This code says: The state may have been taken from us but we will forge a new identity as the state's critics. The other may be in power, but we will march to the tribal square and there confront him together.

The language and imagery are martial; somehow the “peace” orientation that was so gentle and conciliatory toward Yasser Arafat and the PLO gets lost here.

What Peace Now, in other words, really introduced into the Israeli mainstream—with such bloody consequences from the Oslo era to the present—was classic Western appeasement: one’s attackers—no matter how savage—are moral people protesting one’s own immorality; the hawkish camp within one’s own society is the true enemy; by bonding with the attackers one defeats this enemy and ushers in peace.

Indeed, one thing Shavit omits to mention in his article is that during Peace Now’s event at Rabin Square the other night a message was read out from Marwan Barghouti—the Palestinian terrorist sentenced to life imprisonment by an Israeli court in 2004 on five counts of murder.

And what of Shavit’s claim that Peace Now “brought the Israeli center to adopt unmistakably left-wing positions”? It is a self-justifying claim often heard these days from the dwindled ranks of Peace Now and other Israeli leftists, who cite polls finding a majority of Israelis now supporting a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, or the fact that formerly right-wing politicians like Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have now become advocates of that cause.

But whether many Israelis now take this stance because of Peace Now’s influence, tiredness, or a fatalistic sense that the United States and the rest of the world are going to push Israel into this concession in any case (or some combination of those), a poll released this week by the Begin-Sadat Center of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University suggests it’s too soon to write off the general Israeli population as Peace Now converts.

The poll, which focused on the issue of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on Jerusalem—a compromise over the city being considered a sine qua non of a final settlement entailing the rise of a Palestinian state—found 71 percent of Israelis opposing a deal that would require Israel to hand over Jerusalem’s Old City and Temple Mount to the Palestinians. Sixty-two percent were against Jerusalem’s status being discussed in negotiations at all.

And even if a settlement over the city was reached, 61 percent said there was no or very little chance the Palestinians would stop making demands on Israel regarding Jerusalem, 69 percent said there was no or very little chance that Palestinian terror attacks would cease, and 56 percent said any part of Jerusalem the Palestinians would obtain was likely to serve as a base for such attacks.

It sounds, that is, like the old blend of fealty to basic Jewish values and realism that until the Oslo era kept Peace Now positions on the fringe of Israeli politics.

Evidence, though, that a lot of the change in Israel comes from tiredness is the poll’s further finding that among the majority that opposes concessions on Jerusalem, only one-third would express their opposition in demonstrations and the rest would keep it to the ballot box (when it could well be too late) or conversations with family and friends.

Peace Now’s effect on the Israeli public, in other words, may not have been cognitive change so much as damage to morale, as Peace Now helped mobilize and reinforce those international actors most intent—whether out of blindness or malice—on stripping Israel of its strategic assets and implanting a terror state on the very narrow borders that would be left to it. What the still sensible, realistic Israeli majority appears to need most is leaders who will stand up to the Peace Now tide and reaffirm their values and resolve.
P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.